After I created myself – which was, I must say, ridiculously easy – I involved myself straightaway in all sorts of petty dramas, which are great for reinforcing that sense of ‘being somebody’, if you know what I mean. Somebody who has been hard done by, somebody who has been let down by their friends, somebody who has had a lot of bad luck, somebody who has a grudge to hold onto, somebody who has an axe to grind, a chip on their shoulder, a tale to tell, a bone to pick, a nose to pick – that sort of thing. It’s all good…

 

All of that murcky stuff thickens up the soup most excellently – you start off with a thin and watery gruel, not hardly worth a damn, barely any colour or body to it at all, and you end up before very long with a fine thick pea and ham soup, something you could stand a spoon up in. Marvellous stuff…

 

Creating myself in the first place was – as I have said – absurdly easy. As easy as falling off a log. As easy as falling down a hole. As easy as falling headfirst down a drainage ditch in the dark. On your way home late at night. After you’ve had one too many pints of rat’s piss scrumpy. Bright orange in colour and with a filthy mangy head on it like an old urine sample that’s been shaken up too many times.

 

I just kind of ‘tried it out’. I ‘put it on’, you might say. By way of a wheeze. By way of a mad whim. I took a notion, just for a laugh. I experimented momentarily with looking at things a certain sort of a way and it stuck. It’s like what small boys used to be told about pulling faces – you would be told not to pull horrible faces at your little sister in an attempt to frighten her in case the wind suddenly changed direction and you’d be stuck looking like a freak forever. So you’d have to get a job in the circus. Where people would line up to gawp at you.

 

Well, that’s what I did – I pulled a humdinger of a face and it stuck. I pretended to be someone – not anyone in particular, just ‘someone’ – and it stuck like glue. Like when you let out a fart and the smell seems to linger unaccountably in the room for an uncommonly long time afterwards. Much to your discomfort. Or even possibly embarrassment, if you’re expecting guests. Hours and hours, possibly even days. Like psychic farts that can linger in the vicinity for a long, long time. Months or even years. Real buzz killers. Ringers. Mingers. Stingers. Supernatural humdingers. Spoil the mood big time. Frighten people. Ruin the ambience like nothing you’ve ever seen…

 

Anyway that’s what happened to me – I pulled a face in order to scare someone – in order to scare myself actually, if I were to be totally honest about it – and the psychic wind must have switched direction by 180 degrees without any prior warning because the next thing I knew it was stuck. Stuck good and proper. Like it wasn’t coming off. Not ever. I was going to have to live with it, as the man said…

 

Ever since then I’ve been hard at work consolidating the bastard thing. The self that I made. Solidifying it. Congealing it. Putting some oomph in it. Reinforcing it and thickening it up. Giving it some body. Like reinforced concrete has body, you might say. I can’t think why I’m doing this though because I actually hate the bloody thing. Can’t stand it. There’s nothing in the damn thing but pure bloody undiluted suffering. It’s a fucking bona fide non-stop nightmare and that’s no word of a lie…